Mike Miliard

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It's harder than ever to find a bar with soul in town these days. But it's not impossible. Dive bars. Where the drinks are cold and stiff. Where the air wafts with the unmistakable but not-altogether-unpleasant tang of suds long since spilled. Where the neon shines bright and true and the jukebox plays good and loud.

Davis Guggenheim films his essay on the electric guitar Some guitar teachers will tell you there’s a right way and a wrong way to play the guitar. But Davis Guggenheim’s rousing new documentary, It Might Get Loud, reminds us that that’s not true at all.

New England plays catch-up in the green-energy race This past Earth Day, President Barack Obama, speaking at an Iowa wind-turbine factory, delivered a gusty peroration. "The nation that leads the world in creating new energy sources will be the nation that leads the 21st-century global economy," he said. "America can be that nation. America must be that nation."

An energy expert forecasts a blustery day ahead for the region Across New England, there's currently less than 150 megawatts worth of wind turbines installed and operational. That's small change compared with what's happening in places such as Texas and California. But it's a whole lot more than existed just a few years ago.

What's the connection between comedy and percussion? Johnny Carson was revered for his impeccable comic timing. It was "so precise," wrote one newspaper in his obituary, "that we wouldn't be surprised to find buried in his skull a quartz crystal." And why might that be? Perhaps because Johnny Carson was a drummer. In drumming, after all, timing is everything.

Can Chris Kattan be a Bollywood Hero? Here's something Chris Kattan probably rarely hears in real life: "In Night at the Roxbury, you were awesome!" Such, however, is the encomium proffered by two young Indian fans toward the beginning of IFC's somewhat random but not altogether terrible new mini-series Bollywood Hero .

Just say now When the Phoenix published a cover story about the potential tipping point in the fight to end marijuana prohibition, we smelled something in the air: it seemed more than ever that such a resolution might be possible.

Why the cheap, mass-produced food we eat is killing our environment, our economy — and us Since Squanto taught the Pilgrims to plant maize, no food has been more emblematic of the evolution of American eating habits than corn. That's been true from the sepia-tinged golden age of the Midwestern breadbasket to the present day, where those yellow kernels are lab-engineered and recombinated into a dizzying array of futuristic foodstuffs.

Summer-Book Therapy Sessions Beach reading . The very phrase is abhorrent to book lovers, connoting as it does cheap paperbacks, tumescent with air-dried seawater and crunchy with sand, paragraph after paragraph of poorly written pulp meant to be read as fast as the passing of summer itself.

As visually flashy as it is viscerally alarming You are what you eat. And if you're like most Americans, you eat hamburgers made from cows who likely spent their lives crowded in fetid factory farms, ankle-deep in mud and excrement.

A former junkie looks back at tough days in Lowell "You just shit yourself — every muscle, every joint aches. Your entire body cries for heroin. Just one bag of heroin, you know that's all you need, and you'll feel better."

Comic Koffeeklatsch Boston needs more superheroes. Not because our metropolis is gripped by an unprecedented crime spree, but, says Dave Kender, because our comics are perhaps not muscular enough for their own good.

With support from the unlikeliest circles, this could be marijuana's moment The Obama administration, already overtaxed with two foreign campaigns, made headlines this past week when the White House's newly minted director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy called for an end to the "War on Drugs."